Julia Peterkin is chiefly known for her fictional accounts of the Gullahs who lived and worked on the plantations in the Low Country of coastal South Carolina. Her early reputation as a significant Southern writer rested largely on her ability to portray the blacks of her region as three-dimensional characters rather than as the pasteboard stereotypes found in the popular fiction of Old South apologists. When she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for Scarlet Sister Mary, she was hailed by critics, both black and white, as a novelist whose works revealed a sympathetic and realistic stance toward the black community that was rare if not unique among Southern writers. Yet a few years later, after a generation of social protest in which a number of regional novelists turned their attention to the race question, Peterkin began to draw criticism from those quarters where she had initially been praised...